Along the course of our project several happy users have asked how they can show us their appreciation. Because all of the core devs are employed full-time and there is no organization behind LibreNMS, we have turned down monetary thank yous for the most part. That is about to change. Thanks to Open Collective we can accept donations without setting up an organization. We can submit expenses and approve expenses as a team as opposed to individuals or a corporation. All expenses will be visible to the community, because we are an open community. The community is made up of everyone that uses or contributes to LibreNMS no matter how small.
When you support LibreNMS through Open Collective, Backers will be shown on the Open Collective website and Sponsers will have their logo displayed on our github page and on our website.
We would like to stress that this in no way means LibreNMS is becoming a paid for piece of software, licensed or having paid only features. LibreNMS is built by passionate FOSS contributors and the primary goal of the project is to ensure that people get access to a great network monitoring system for no cost at all.
LibreNMS is free, it will remain free forever.
So, what do we plan to do with the money?
We will use it to grow and improve LibreNMS. How we do that is ultimately up to the community, if you have a good idea let us know and we’ll see what we can do. If enough money is raised we have discussed the possibility of enabling a core team member to work full time on LibreNMS. We are pretty excited about this possibility. We have only begun to plan for this and we will share more details later. The first step is to get the ball rolling financially.
We hope you are excited too! Come be a part of the LibreNMS community and discuss this on Discord and the community site.